OCLC Testing PDF-based Article ILL Service
By David Rapp Aug 5, 2010OCLC is currently field-testing a new service called Direct Request for Articles, in which PDFs of complete journal articles are made available through the OCLC's WorldCat Resource Sharing interlibrary-loan service.
Requesting PDFs
Using the service, a patron submits an ILL request for a particular article; the service then determines what participating library owns the material in electronic form, and whether the material is available via ILL. It then produces a link to a full PDF of the article when available.
However, the number of articles that could be available using such a system may be relatively small due to license agreements, which vary from library to library.
"We only lend material from our electronic collections when our licenses specifically allow us to do so using the technology employed by the Direct Request program," said James Mouw, assistant director for technical and electronic services at the University of Chicago Library, one of the field-test libraries for the service. "This encompasses approximately 20 percent of the titles that we hold in online format."
That said, the service also could help speed retrieval of articles available in a library's own physical collections. Tony Melvyn, OCLC's product manager for WorldCat Resource Sharing, told LJ that some of the field-test libraries have reported that 20 to 30 percent of the article requests they receive are for materials they already own but the patron can't easily find. The service informs the libraries that they own the article, but still provides the PDF link when available.
For WorldCat Resource Sharing, OCLC offers customized subscription pricing for individual institutions and library groups; when the new service goes live, there will be no additional charge.
The Pubget trend
OCLC's service, aimed primarily at academic libraries, shares some similarities with that provided by Cambridge, MA-based Pubget, which allows users to view complete life-science journal articles from journals to which their institutions subscribe (or purchase the articles directly). Such full-text results contrast with the National Library of Medicine's widely-used PubMed database, which consists largely of abstracts and citations.
Lorcan Dempsey, a vice president and chief strategist at OCLC who oversees its research division, mentioned Pubget as indicative of a near-future trend during the Top Technology Trends panel at the American Library Association annual conference in June. Pubget is free to nonprofit institutions and their libraries and researchers.
Academic libraries field-testing
Direct Request for Articles is based around a collective database from participating OCLC libraries in the program. During the testing phase, which began last month, 14 academic libraries have added their SFX or Serials Solutions databases to the collective OCLC database.
The participating libraries in the field-test group include those at the aforementioned University of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University, the University of Virginia, North Carolina State University, and Penn State University, among others.
Melvyn said that OCLC hopes to add Direct Request for Articles as a feature of WorldCat Resource Sharing by the end of August, before the academic year begins.
